


Shelter As We Go

by auxanges



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Act Seven, Fluff and Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Night Terrors
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-10
Updated: 2016-12-10
Packaged: 2018-09-07 14:44:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,071
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8804956
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/auxanges/pseuds/auxanges
Summary: “I’ll help, okay?” You don’t know what you’re offering to help with, but this has never stopped you before, not in years. Some call it a redeeming quality; some call it really fucking stupid.





	

**Author's Note:**

> i read it. in this godforsaken hell year of our lord 2016, i read it  
> destressor/character practice/bluh bluh  
> this is saved as sorry dave.doc on my laptop

You’re used to Dave waking up in the middle of the night by now. His tosses and turns run like clockwork — which seems appropriate to you — and the sighs of the mattress under his body are like a metronome that soothe your system back to sleep. Sometimes his feet brush against yours: Dave is a furnace, he sleeps in a tank top and tacky boxers, the stark white of his calves at odds with the deep blue of your pyjama pants. 

You share a bed every time he comes over, which is often, and not at all to your discontent. Dave brings a shitty movie to watch like a peace offering neither of you really needs, and the dim glow of your TV (“Can you even see anything with your glasses on? I can turn the brightness up”) makes your shadows dance on the walls. More often than not, Dave’s head lolls against your shoulder, and you let out a soft exhale in place of a laugh and settle the both of you back against the pillows as carefully as possible. 

There’s no way of telling how much or how little sleep he gets. 

Tonight, though, tonight’s different. Tonight, thunder rolls just beneath your skin, seeping into your dreams, and you jerk awake to a particularly loud clap outside your window. Cold air hits your back; Dave’s not here. You fumble clumsily for your glasses in the dark: between strobe flashes of lightning, you see the open bathroom door, the light from the half-burnt bulbs at odds with the weather outside. 

You sit up, rub your eyes under your glasses. “Dave?” 

No reply. Rain patters against your window, inside the confines of your ribcage. You’ve never minded storms. Maybe it’s your aspect, or maybe it’s a lucky break from all the universes you’ve crossed to get here. But it doesn’t give Dave the same comfort it does you, and you count to fifty under your breath before calling his name again. 

The sound of the faucet squeaking on reaches your ears. Curious, you swing your legs over the side of the mattress: the floor is freezing. You pad over to the bathroom, swaying as you go. The storm must have surged your power at some point, and thanks to a useless blinking clock you have no idea what time it is. The trek from the warm cocoon of your blankets seems miles long, but you get there eventually. You brace a hand in the doorway, squinting in the light. 

Dave’s got the taps on full blast, his hands rubbing together under the spray. Steam curls around his elbows and creeps along the edges of the mirror. His hair, messy from the pillow, falls in front of his face, a ghostly curtain between acts of awake and asleep. 

“Dave,” you coax a third time, crossing the threshold into the bathroom. “Everything, uh…?”

He mumbles something unintelligible. You begin to reach out an arm, hesitate, then wrap cautious fingers around one of his wrists. His skin is cold from the water, smooth as the day he made god tier. A shameful part of you feels relief that the only difference in Dave’s arms is the redness where he’s scrubbed at the skin. 

“Come back to bed, man. It’s late. Or early. Something.” You give his arm a tiny, experimental tug. Dave is bigger than you, stronger than you, and for all the good it does you still can’t fathom what he’s done in your absence and beyond to spring so many steps ahead of you. 

“Can’t geddidoff,” Dave slurs, his voice thick with a combination of sleep and choked-down emotion.

Your eyebrows come together in concern. “Get what off?”

He stares down at the wrist you’re holding, confused. “I can’t…”

“Dave.” A fourth time: his name feels like a sage’s prayer under your tongue, short and powerful and achingly familiar, one you never get tired of using. “C’mon,” you say, and pull him a little harder towards you. 

The resistance you feel makes your heart constrict. Dave’s bare feet slip on the wet tiles, and he stumbles in an effort to stay rooted to the spot. “Wait. Wait, wait—”

“I’ll help, okay?” You don’t know what you’re offering to help _with_ , but this has never stopped you before, not in years. Some call it a redeeming quality; some call it really fucking stupid. “Lemme help. Just come back to bed, please.”

Something in Dave seems to give way, and he lets you half-pull, half-lead him back to the bed. He doesn’t look at you. You’re halfway there before your tired brain realizes the front of his shirt is soaking wet. What the shit? 

Outside, the storm doesn’t grant you the peace you probably could do with. There’s strange weather in this universe: one of the moons has wrenched itself free of the clouds, and pale light of a colour you can’t really identify streaks sickly through your window. In it, you can see the water on Dave’s arms, well past his elbows. Even his neck and throat—you’re starting to wonder why he didn’t sleepwalk himself right into the shower and get it over with. If sleepwalking is even responsible for this. 

You gently sit him on the bed, perching cross-legged across from him with your feet tucked under you like you’re a kid again. “Okay,” you say. “What’s wrong, Dave? Full sentences, if you can, please.” 

Dave still doesn’t meet your eyes. “There’s too much of it. Too fuckin’ much.” 

“Too much of what?” You bite back a grimace at the steep incline in pitch of your voice, an old, panicky thing you can’t seem to shake even after all this time. 

In lieu of acknowledgement, he resumes checking himself for what you can only begin to assume is injury, trailing two or three fingers over the shock-pale expanse of his skin. At his neck, they curl on something invisible, and Dave sucks in a horrible breath that’s jumped from his nightmares straight into yours so, so many times. 

Your heart drops into your stomach, and even further still. You reach a second time, urgent and careful all at once, cup his face in your palms. “Hey—”

And Dave looks up, and lightning cuts blue and unforgiving across his face, and stays there; the storm outside slows to molasses. Here, in suspended animation, it’s you and your best friend and his burning-coal eyes, blown with what you thought were dreams but turn out to be memory. 

_Oh, Dave._

You’re not a Seer, far from it, but it’s all laid bare in his face anyway, the cloudy scarlets and vermilions of everything he’s done. For a second — the longest second of your existence, and you’ve admittedly had some pretty long ones — all of his lives seep between your fingers, over your knuckles. Dave’s hands grapple for your arms, slick with the red he'd been trying to wash off. More of the colour you’re so _sick_ of seeing him sacrifice blossoms like the world’s most awful garden; his stomach, dark and fast; his throat, too bright and too _painful_ to look at. You rake your eyes up to meet his, and there’s his brother, silhouetted somewhere he keeps hidden for a reason, for a dozen reasons, a sword in his chest and the shine of tears Dave’s too stubborn to shed like a funhouse mirror. 

You are notoriously bad at the whole nightmare-memory thing. The Dave thing, on the other hand, you feel fairly confident in your abilities. 

Brushing your thumbs over his cheeks, you lean forward: he’s a goddamn radiator, fever-hot all the way to his fingertips still digging into your forearms. Dave obediently closes his eyes, and when you press your lips to one, then the other, he lets out a long sigh between his teeth. You feel him shiver. 

“John,” he breathes, and you kiss him proper, light and unhurried, because Dave fucking Strider doesn’t give two shits and a popsicle about running out of time for things like this. His mouth is as warm as the rest of him, grateful and very much awake, and his hands slowly trail up your arms to your back to pull you flush against him. You let out an unconscious little yelp when your chest makes contact with his wet shirt. 

You feel him smile. “John,” he says again, against your lips. Another invocation from someone who doesn’t need to answer to anyone, not in your opinion. 

His hair tickles the bridge of your nose. The Long Second falls away with a sound like muffled crystal, and the storm roars back into existence. Dave frowns, but it’s a frown you _know_ , and you set to kissing that, too. 

“You got a wet floor sign or something? Someone made an awful fuckin’ mess of your bathroom.”

You laugh at that. “Nah. I have towels.”

“Hm. Less official than a sign, but I guess it’ll have to do. But you should really get on that shit, probably.” Dave’s preoccupied with your hair, twirling black strands of it between his fingers like some schoolboy. 

“Probably,” you echo. Your words are clumsy things, sometimes, after they've tasted Dave Strider's own unspoken ones.

Dave’s fingers in your hair slow. (You’re a little disappointed.) “What is it?”

And you have the decency to blush, staring at him intently like that: trying to figure out where you’ve banished whatever ghosts he keeps. Their shadows never join yours on the walls, their footprints don’t leave track marks in the carpet. 

Dave just looks at you, head tilted the slightest bit like some bird, eyes bright and relaxed, for once in his life. Candles instead of coal. “Dude.”

“Nothing,” you reply, “it’s nothing.” Not for today, at least: as far as mysteries are concerned, Dave is the gift that keeps on giving. You bring up a hand from his waist to his bangs, brush them to the side. He raises an eyebrow in silent response, but finally concedes.

“I,” he says, “am really. Really tired.”

You pull him backwards with you towards the pillows (and forget about his shirt _again_ in the process, resulting in the subtraction of one pair of glasses, one sleep shirt and the addition of at least three shades of red to your cheeks), a tangle of limbs. You convince the gale outside to dial it down, just a bit, please, and Dave relaxes more against you. 

Your head on his bare chest, you can hear the stubborn cadence of his heart, and wonder if that’s where the ghosts live. Other things can live there, too, you decide. You entertain the idea of asking Dirk, but that would take away one of those mysteries you enjoy so much. 

Dave’s arm drapes loosely over you, and his hand gives your shoulder a brief squeeze in a language you learned not long after you started pestering one another. You answer in kind, your face in the crook of his shoulder. He’s out in two minutes, easy, even breaths that lull you into dreams you so desperately wish you could share. 

When morning comes, he’s out of bed before you again. You barely have time to reach for your glasses and wonder where he’s gone before you see his aviators poke out from the hall, kicking the corner of a towel into the bathroom and brandishing a plate of toast. His shirt is still off, his ugly boxers showing off remnants of whatever tan a kid that pale can obtain.

You commit the whole damn thing to memory.

You crack a sleepy smile. “They look, um. Really good.”

“Thanks, burned the shit out of ’em just for you.” He puts down the plate, picking up a piece of toast with one hand and reaching into his backpack for a DVD.

You stare. “ _Top Gun?_ _And_ toast?”

Dave looks up from setting up the TV and waggles his eyebrows, an amusing effect over the rim of his glasses. “With commentary,” he says around a mouthful of toast.

“Strider, your powers of seduction are on another level this morning.”

“Don’t push it, breeze boy.” He settles comfortably in your lap, turning his head and pressing a chaste kiss to one of your pyjama-clad thighs. “And if you start singing about the danger zone, Egbert, so help me God I will put Tom Cruise and his ill-fated avian-themed wingman in the toaster too.”

“You wouldn’t!” 

**Author's Note:**

> kickin it on tumblr  
> i still dont know how to do [titles]() or tags sick


End file.
